Shamsie's Home Fire continues to burn bright with £10k Hellenic Prize win

Kamila Shamsie has been awarded 2017's £10,000 London Hellenic Prize, given to the best book inspired by or relating to Greece, for Home Fire (Bloomsbury).

Shamsie claimed the award on Monday night (26th November) at a ceremony hosted by Professor Gonda Van Steen, herself a previous winner of the prize, in the Great Hall of Kings College London.

The novel, a contemporary reimagining of Sophocles' Antigone, bagged the award after submissions from 102 authors and 33 publishers were received for consideration from all around the world.

Now in its 21st year, the London Hellenic Prize celebrates "the cultural cross-fertilisation of the Greek and English-speaking worlds" and this year was judged by a six-strong panel chaired by Dr Jennifer Wallace (Peterhouse, Cambridge).

To win the prize, Shamsie fended off competition from six other books on the prize's shortlist: Josephine Balmer's The Paths of Survival (Shearsman Books); Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey: a Father, a Son and an Epic (William Collins); Yopie Prins' Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (Princeton University Press); Colm Toibin's House of Names (Viking); David Vann's Bright Air Black (Windmill Books); and Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey (W. W. Norton).

As well as already scooping the Women's Prize for Fiction last year, Home Fire is currently in the running for the $25k DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.